I Went To A Top School And It Was A Waste

Peter Thiel, Facebook billionaire, hedge fund manager and PayPal
co-founder, doesn't mind courting controversy. After correctly
foreseeing the dotcom and subprime busts, he has been lambasting
higher education as the next big bubble, in
the Journal, the
National Review and most recently
to TechCrunch's Sarah Lacy.

He draws the following comparisons between the real estate bubble
and higher education:

A consumption decision masqueraded as an investment
decision. Building that megamansion with a pool and
gold bathroom fixtures really isn't an investment. College is
often a four-year party rather than a real investment in
education and the future. This thesis isn't new: Norwegian
economist Thorstein Veblen wrote
in 1899 that higher education was a form of conspicuous
consumption.

A kernel of truth transformed into a dogma whose every
critic is shouted down. "House prices only go up!" "We
must invest in education to win the future!"

Thiel has also created a program called
20 Under 20 that will award 20 people under 20 a $100,000
cash grant and mentorship from Thiel and his network, to stop out
of school and pursue projects, which has been predictably
controversial. How dare he encourage impressionable young people
to quit school!

Well, if the program had been around when I was under 20, I would
have applied, and it could have saved me a whole lot of trouble.

I was never really good at school. As a child I was expelled from
a handful of prestigious prep schools and graduated high school
at 15 but with scores putting me in the top 30% nationally, way
below what is required to advance through France's highly elitist
higher ed system. I enrolled in a second-tier college, studied
liberal arts for a year and then dropped out to make movies with
friends. Driven by constant parental nagging and a pretty huge
chip on my shoulder, I clawed my way to the top
law school and business school in
my country.

From 2002, when I graduated high school, to 2010 when I graduated
business school, I accomplished approximately nothing, at least
professionally.

This isn't to complain about problems that are utterly
insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but to say that
there are plenty of smart people who simply aren't that fit for
elite education. Even though they could (and sometimes do) pursue
it, it's really a waste of resources on both ends. I learned
plenty of stuff in business school and met plenty of interesting
people, but was it worth the debt and the opportunity costs? I
don't know for sure, but something tells me Business Insider
would have hired me regardless.

When I was under 20 I was an aimless computer geek who had no
idea that you could actually build interesting stuff online and
potentially even make money from them. There's no question 20
Under 20 would have been a lifeline for me and saved me a lot of
trouble.

In any case, despite the controversy Thiel is not going to back
away from 20 Under 20. In a 2007 article on philanthropy for
First Things, before he set up his Thiel Foundation, he
wrote:

[R]emembering that the distinctive purpose of foundations is
not to provide charity but to help find innovative ways to effect
permanent positive change in society, thoughtful donors should
look for projects that are instrumental and uncharted, instead of
merely expressive and replicative. And that means taking
risks—not just the risk of financial loss but also the risk of
social embarrassment.